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| George Grotz, Metropolis, 1916 |
Start:Stop at St Stephen Walbrook enables busy people to start their day by stopping to reflect. Ten minute reflections are repeated on the quarter hour, from 7.45am until 9.00am every Tuesday morning, beginning with a reading from scripture, followed by a reflection based on an event from this week in history, with space for silence and prayer. You can hear a recording of this week’s reflection at this link and read the script below.
Good morning and welcome to St Stephen Walbrook and our Start:Stop reflection. Today is the anniversary of the birth of master-storyteller Charles Dickens, whose Night Walks through the streets of Victorian London provided the inspiration for novels and short stories that revealed his concern for the poor and the oppressed.
Dickens had an on-off relationship with the church into which he was baptised. Though, by his own admission, at times he struggled to do so himself, he was highly critical of those who attended church every week to say the creeds but who seemed to fail to act upon them. People who “talked the talk but didn’t walk the walk.”
A criticism shared by the author of the First Letter of John, writing to the church in the first century. His readers are exhorted to live the word - through acts of righteousness.
Our reading this morning is from the second chapter of the First Letter of John.
